Jim Miller on Politics

Pseudo-Random Thoughts

Obama Asked For Better Relationships With Iran: The Supreme Leader said
No.

Prior to this month's disputed presidential election in Iran, the Obama administration sent a letter to
the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling for an improvement in relations, according
to interviews and the leader himself.

Ayatollah Khamenei confirmed the letter toward the end of a lengthy sermon last week, in which he accused
the United States of fomenting protests in his country in the aftermath of the disputed June 12
presidential election.
. . .
"The American president was quoted as saying that he expected the people of Iran to take to the streets,"
Ayatollah Khamenei misquoted Mr. Obama as saying, according to a translation by Mideastwire.com.

"On the one hand, they [the Obama administration] write a letter to us to express their respect for the
Islamic Republic and for re-establishment of ties, and on the other hand they make these remarks.
Which one of these remarks are we supposed to believe? Inside the country, their agents were
activated. Vandalism started. Sabotaging and setting fires on the streets started.
Some shops were looted. They wanted to create chaos. Public security was violated.
The violators are not the public or the supporters of the candidates. They are the ill-wishers,
mercenaries and agents of the Western intelligence services and the Zionists."

To which I will add a
very big one. The state auditor (a
Democrat) just got done auditing King County (Seattle and most Seattle suburbs). The county
administration is a mess, as even our local newspapers have had to admit. I am not an accountant,
but I am pretty sure that no publicly-held company would have been able to get away with what King
County has been doing for years.

This example has national implications; the county executive here since 1987 1997 has been Democrat
Ron Sims, whom Obama named, earlier this year, to be
Deputy Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. (Incidentally,
Sims' managerial incompetence was well known in this area, though our local journalists did not exactly
emphasize that fact.)

S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford admitted today that his secret trip to Argentina over the Father's Day weekend was
to visit a woman he has been having an affair with for the past year.

In an emotional news conference, Sanford said his relationship with the woman in Argentina would not work,
but would not say if it was over. He did not name the woman, but said he met her eight years ago,
although their casual friendship evolved into a romantic relationship about a year ago.

Note to elected Republicans: You aren't Democrats, so you can't get away with these affairs, if they
become public.

And a question for the Instapundit: You say,
and I agree, that "we should be glad he didn't get any closer to the White House". Should John F.
Kennedy and Bill Clinton have been disqualified for similar recklessness?

What makes this especially annoying is that, from what I can tell, Sanford has been a good governor of
South Carolina. And that "mainstream" reporters will be delighted by this story, just as they were
beginning to ask a few hard questions of the Obama administration.

Obama Arranges A Little Show: Here's the story from a properly cynical
Dana Milbank.

In his first daytime news conference yesterday, President Obama preempted "All My Children," "Days of Our
Lives" and "The Young and the Restless." But the soap viewers shouldn't have been disappointed:
The president had arranged some prepackaged entertainment for them.

After the obligatory first question from the Associated Press, Obama treated the overflowing White House
briefing room to a surprise. "I know Nico Pitney is here from the Huffington Post," he announced.

Obama knew this because White House aides had called Pitney the day before to invite him, and they had
escorted him into the room. They told him the president was likely to call on him, with the
understanding that he would ask a question about Iran that had been submitted online by an Iranian.

Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any
significant changes in the conditions there isn't that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are
working for?

(Though it could have been phrased more clearly.)

But the incident should remind us that almost all of what we see in political events is staged. And
the more that we want government to be open, the more we should expect that events like press conferences
will be staged, at least in part.

There are still numerous other matters concerning me, about which I have also had a little time to reflect
this weekend. I realized early on (in my first week as Minister, in fact) that Open Government
presents real problems. It was made clear to me that if people stop having secrets they stop
having power.

In fact, paradoxically, government is more open when it is less open. Open government is rather like
live theatre: the audience gets a performance. And it gives a response. But, like the theatre,
in order to have something openly there must first be much hidden activity. And all sorts of things
have to be cut or altered in rehearsals, and not shown to the public until you have got them right.

We can not escape these shows — especially with this administration — but we can recognize
that we are seeing shows, even soap operas, as Milbank would have it. And we can recognize that,
if we want to understand policy, we should seek knowledge in other places.

There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult
supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties
indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely
to do so.

Some of this is a legitimate response to the political process: Voters tend to elect presidents who seem
to possess qualities and views they thought lacking in their predecessors. But some of it, and
especially in the case of Barack Obama, seems to come from an adolescentlike confidence that everything
done by those who came before is (insert your own generation's expletive here).

Here's a terrifying thought: Some people — and we can all think of examples — never
grow up.

Communist Regimes Have Been Doing Something Similar For Years: But, if I
recall correctly, they
usually charge less.

The family of an Iranian man killed in a demonstration against the country's contested presidential election
has been ordered to pay the equivalent of $3,000 for the bullets that took his life, according to The
Wall Street Journal.

Worth Reading: Tom Maguire's
dissection of a New York Times editorial. Here's his lead sentence:

The NY Times editors are so vexed by what they see as the latest blatant injustice from the Roberts Court
that they can't be bothered to read the court's opinion or their own coverage of the case (Matt Yglesias
keeps them company).

(The Times was troubled because the court did not order the states to supply DNA tests to those
convicted. As it happens, I think that the states should be willing to take a second look at
many of these cases — but I also think that there is nothing in the Constitution that requires them
to do so.)

Warning: The crimes committed were horrific. (The crimes got no attention from the editorial
writers, perhaps because the victim was a prostitute, perhaps because the criminal is black.)

It would be nice if the editorial writers at the Times were more constrained by facts, but I don't think we
can expect that any time soon, even if those facts are recounted in their own news pages.

Meanwhile, Back In Barack Obama's Chicago: Corruption continues,
as usual.

The city of Chicago spends more than $22 million a year leasing property, usually from clout-heavy landlords
and often at higher rents than other tenants pay, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

One of those landlords has been in the public spotlight of late -- Mayor Daley's nephew Robert Vanecko.
His real estate investment firm used city pension money to buy a Southwest Side warehouse that the city
leases to park dump trucks, the Sun-Times has reported.

Is it fair to tie this to Obama? I think so, for two reasons. As far as I can tell, Obama did
nothing about corruption during his political career in Chicago. Nothing.

And he supported politicians he must have known were corrupt, and was supported by corrupt men, most
notably Tony Rezko.

Like the first Mayor Daley, Obama may not be corrupt himself, but he tolerated corruption in Chicago.
(The second Mayor Daley probably follows the same pattern, but I am less familiar with his career.)

More Royalist Than The King? Back when European monarchies had real power,
some of their strongest supporters were often said to be more royalist than the king. I was reminded
of that old line when I watched this exchange. CBS's Harry Smith says that Bush described Obama as "treacherous". Obama just
laughs at Smith, in the way the old monarchs must have laughed when one of their strongest supporters
said something absurd, in trying to support the monarch.

One wonders whether Smith actually read Bush's remarks, or even a good newspaper account of them, before
that interview. As I mentioned in this post, Bush defended
his own policies — and deliberately avoided mentioning Obama.

(Haven't figured out a good modern version of that phrase. "More Obama loving than Obama" catches
the thought, but doesn't have much of a ring to it. We may need a good modern version, so if you
think of one, let me know.)

- 8:26 AM, 23 June 2009

More on what Bush
actually said, from Paul Kengor,
who was there. Sample:

As president, George W. Bush was, of course, widely disregarded for his oratorical shortcomings. His
failure to communicate his core message, especially regarding his Middle East vision, was central to
his record disapproval.

And yet, Bush was magnificent last Wednesday. He spoke with no teleprompter and few notes.
After formal remarks, he reclined in a leather chair and answered audience-supplied questions. It
was Bush unplugged.

In 1993, Mindy Cameron Did Something Brilliant: At that time, Cameron was
the editorial page editor of the Seattle Times, and a good one, in my opinion, though she and I did not
always agree on issues.

That was back in January of 1993. Democrats had taken over just about everything - the White House, most
of Washington state's congressional delegation, the state Legislature. An activist liberal had just
been elected governor.

The editorial page of the state's leading newspaper was the ideal place for a brash young conservative
critic to take on all those Democrats. Carlson did that job very well and with relish.

In other words, Cameron thought that domination by one party (and one side of the ideological spectrum)
made it more important for a news organization to give opposing views.

The Times did not keep talk show host (and later, gubernatorial candidate) John Carlson for reasons that
Cameron explains in her column. But in the same column, she made this promise:

But surely John Carlson is not the only conservative in the region who aspires to reach the broad
audience The Seattle Times delivers. We expect to find a replacement who can meet our expectations
of fresh perspective every week.

And kept that promise, by hiring Michelle Malkin.
Though Malkin eventually went on to other things, including a web site
you may have heard of, she did fine work at the Times. Even though she was an editorial writer,
she was willing to go out and do serious digging. (Probably her most important work was digging up
fund raising — let's call them irregularities — by "squeaky clean"
Gary Locke.) While Malkin
was at the Times she was, by a considerable margin, the most interesting writer there.

That bit of local history led me to write this email to Cameron's successor, Jim Vesely:

Dear Mr. Vesely:

First, let me wish you well in your retirement. I hope that you enjoy yours as much as I am
enjoying mine. (And if you should happen to feel public-spirited enough to join me in criticizing
our "mainstream" journalists from time to time, I would be delighted.)

Although I wish you well in retirement, you left before I could ask you a policy question,
and before I could ask you to correct an embarrassing error. The second I will do next week; the
first I am doing now.

Your predecessor as editorial page editor, Mindy Cameron, decided in 1993 that, since the political
world was dominated by liberal Democrats, to hire conservative critics. And did so, first John
Carlson and then Michelle Malkin. I think that was a brilliant decision. (Some might consider
the move obvious, but there are so few similar examples that I think it fair to call it brilliant.)

As in 1993, the national government is now controlled by Democrats, as are the city of Seattle, King
County, and Washington state. Do you think that news organizations should follow Cameron's example,
and make a special effort to provide ideas from opponents of the party in power?

Note that I did not say that the news organizations should do exactly what Cameron did, and
hire some one who usually votes for the opposition party. I understand that many news organizations
are having trouble paying the employees they already have. But there are still things that news
organizations can do.

Here's an example: Editorial writer Lynne Varner often writes on education, and it is no secret
that she usually (always?) supports the Democratic party. But I would like to think that she is
honest enough, and a good enough journalist, so that she could fairly examine this question: Which
president, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, did the most to improve education before they
became president?

Both men worked at educational reform, Bush as governor of Texas, and Obama as head of the Chicago
Annenberg Challenge. But which man actually improved the schools, as measured by test scores?
(Bush had more money to work with, but much tighter constraints, so I think the comparison is fair.)

I think that Varner can find the answer to that question, with a little bit of digging. (And I
will even give her some help. Ethan Bronner did a good piece in the New York Times on
Bush's accomplishments in 1999 or 2000, and the Challenge did some formal assessments of their own
accomplishments, which should be easy to find.)

If Varner is willing to accept that challenge, she will learn enough to write a fascinating
column, one that would surprise most readers of the Seattle Times.

I could give you half a dozen other suggestions, but have taken enough of your time already. (But
if any current members of the editorial board are interested in emulating Cameron, and want ideas on how
to give opposing views, I would be glad to help them.)

Best,
Jim Miller

PS - As I assume you have already guessed, I have posted this letter at my own site and at
Sound Politics, and will post your answer at both sites.

The Times's concern for the safety of its reporter, however, provides a macabre contrast with the
Times's illegal exposure of the NSA terrorist eavesdropping program in December 2005, as well as its
exposure of the Treasury Department's terrorist-finance tracking program in June 2006. Whereas
the reporting of Rohde's apprehension may have endangered his life, the disclosure of the NSA terrorist
eavesdropping and terrorist finance tracking programs only threatened the security of the United States.

Which is a matter of less importance to the New York Times. At least when a Republican is in the
White House.

Ed Morrissey knew about the captive reporter, but
didn't publish.
The Times should — but won't — learn from his discretion.
(Even Howard Kurtz wonders whether journalists gave "special treatment to one of their own". Actually, I
suspect he knows, but prefers not to say, directly.)

The Eastman Kodak Co. announced Monday it's retiring its most senior film because of declining customer
demand in an increasingly digital age.

The world's first commercially successful color film, immortalized in song by Simon, spent 74 years in
Kodak's portfolio. It enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and '60s but in recent years has nudged closer
to obscurity: Sales of Kodachrome are now just a fraction of 1 percent of the company's total sales
of still-picture films, and only one commercial lab in the world still processes it.

(Actually, it was "immortalized" by photographers long before Paul Simon wrote his song.)

I still use it for outdoor shots occasionally, but not enough others do. I like it because
it has a good balance between realism and saturated colors.

To celebrate the film, Kodak has a gallery
of great Kodachrome pictures. The gallery is run by an annoying Adobe Flash program,
but the pictures are so good that you may not mind it.

(Paul Simon's song will get a few more replays in
the next week or so.)

The Financial Crisis Has Been Very, Very Good To Goldman Sachs: Those
who work for the company have reason to
celebrate.

Staff at Goldman Sachs staff can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history
after a spectacular first half of the year, sparking concern that the big investment banks which survived
the credit crunch will derail financial regulation reforms.

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income
products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Mo doubt some of them will recycle part of those bonuses back to the politicians they credit for
their financial success.

Obama's borrowing will mean hundreds of millions for the company.

"These banks are intermediaries in the bond markets where governments and companies are raising billions
of pounds of new money. There is also a lack of competition that means they can charge huge sums
for doing business."

Last week, the firm predicted that President Barack Obama's government could issue $3.25tn of debt before
September, almost four times last year's sum. Goldman, a prime broker of US government bonds,
is expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from selling and dealing in the bonds.

These immense profits would trouble me less if Goldman Sachs weren't so very well connected,
politically, to both Democrats and Republicans. (Henry Paulson, Bush's last Treasury Secretary, came
directly from Goldman Sachs. His predecessor at the firm, Jon Corzine, is the Democratic
governor of New Jersey.)

(Did Henry Paulson do too much for Goldman Sachs,
as Treasury Secretary? That's a fair question, but not one I can answer at present. But I
will be looking for a good study of that question.

Paulson demanded, and received, considerable independence when Bush named him to the position, but Bush was still, formally, responsible for
Paulson's actions.)

In other words, if you believed something closer to the opposite of what Obama promised, that would be
closer to the truth. When Obama said he "will keep this promise":

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period.

he actually meant:

If you like your doctor, many of you will NOT be able to keep your doctor. Period.

And when Obama said he "will keep this promise":

If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period.
No one will take it away. No matter what.

Obama really meant:

If you like your health care plan, many — perhaps most — of you will NOT be able to keep your
health care plan. Period. Someone — perhaps your employer — may take it
away. It all depends on how things work out.

A little bit of thought would show you that Obama's promises are incompatible. For example,
he is promising both to cut costs and to let everyone keep the doctors they like. But what if the
doctor you like charges more than other doctors?

Proposals to reform, or perhaps I should say "reform", medical insurance in the United States always run
into a fundamental political difficulty: Most people like their doctors and hospitals, and
don't want to change. Obama tried to evade that problem in his speech to the AMA by promising that
none of us would be forced to change. He may believe that, or he may have believed it when he
said it, but no serious person believes it, as White House officials had to admit.

Iran's Guardian Council has admitted that the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number
of those eligible to cast ballot in those areas.

The council's Spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, who was speaking on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting
(IRIB) Channel 2 on Sunday, made the remarks in response to complaints filed by Mohsen Rezaei -- a
defeated candidate in the June 12 Presidential election.

"Statistics provided by Mohsen Rezaei in which he claims more than 100% of those eligible have cast their
ballot in 170 cities are not accurate -- the incident has happened in only 50 cities," Kadkhodaei said.

(Caveat: I have not been able to find this story anywhere else.)

If this story is correct, then we can conclude that vote fraud was widespread in the Iranian election.
(Assuming, of course, that the statistics on eligible voters are reasonably accurate.)

And that it was committed by clumsy, or very frightened, crooks. Smarter, or calmer, crooks would
not have produced results with such glaring flaws.

Second, a quick
study done by researchers
at a respected British think tank, Chatham House, found a
number of anomalies, including this one:

In two Conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, a turnout of more than 100% was recorded.

(By "Conservative", they mean supporting the regime.)

I may have more to say about that study, after I have had time to read it carefully.

(Although the BBC has nothing as direct as the the other two sources, they do provide some information
on how some of the vote fraud might have been
committed. Those "mobile polling
stations" do look suspicious. If I recall correctly, similar stations have been used to commit
vote fraud in Ukraine.)

- 8:07 PM, 21 June 2009

Much More: the New York Times, along many other news organizations, has
now published an
article
mentioning the fifty cities in which there were more votes than voters. Political scientist Walter
Mebane has updated his analysis, which is
similar to that done by the Chatham House researchers. (Credit where due: Mebane "published"
before they did.) Political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco did a neat analysis using only the last two digits of the provincial returns.

Joe Lenski adds some context from another disputed election, this one in Azerbaijan, Iran's northern neighbor.

Higher Taxes Coming? They will, if Obama gets his way on the
federal takeover of health
insurance.

House Democrats have lots of potential targets for higher taxes as they aim to expand health care coverage
to reach the roughly 50 million that experts say are uninsured.

Also under consideration are higher alcohol taxes, increases to the Medicare payroll tax and a
value-added tax, a sort of national sales tax, of up to 1.5 percent or more.

This shouldn't surprise anyone — except those who believed Obama's promise that he would cut taxes
for 95 percent of us.

It was always obvious that Obama's spending promises would require much higher taxes and obvious, to anyone
who can do arithmetic, that the top 5 percent didn't have enough money to pay all of those higher taxes.

As indignation turned to outrage Thursday among critics of an ABC News prime-time special on President
Obama's health care policy, The Washington Times has learned that ABC employees gave 80 times as much money
to Mr. Obama's 2008 campaign for president than to his rival's.

According to an analysis of campaign donations by the Center for Responsive Politics, conducted at The
Times' request, ABC employees in several divisions donated $124,421 to the Obama campaign, compared with
$1,550 to the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain.
. . .
A study released Thursday by the Business & Media Institute (BMI) found that since Inauguration Day,
ABC has aired news stories with positive reviews of Mr. Obama's health care policy 55 times, compared with
18 times when the network highlighted negative reviews.

What that 80-1 ratio suggests to me is that many ABC employees do not know any McCain supporters.
So they don't have any friends to tell them when they are losing credibility. (Not that they had
much credibility left to lose.)

(Here's the verse, if, like me, you were trying to remember
the exact words.)

Actually, Bush Didn't: You have probably seen the
headline:
"Bush takes swipes at Obama policies"

But if you read the article, you will see that Bush did not "take swipes" at Obama's policies; instead, Bush defended
his own policies. That may seem like a meaningless difference, but as the article makes clear,
Bush made a point of not criticizing Obama directly.

Half Empty, Or Empty? You often hear that the drug war has been lost.
For example, Nicholas Kristof made just that argument on
Sunday.

Somewhat to my surprise, the letters editor at the New York Times printed this
reply.

Drugs have not "won the war." With a comprehensive anti-drug strategy in place, involving foreign policy,
enforcement, education, treatment, prevention and media, America's overall drug use has declined almost
by half in the past three decades — from 14.1 percent of the population in 1979 to 8.3 percent now
who used drugs in the past month. In addition, cocaine use, including crack — the source of
much of the former record-high violent crime numbers — is down 70 percent. Want to go
back?

Legalization would be a catastrophe. Nicholas D. Kristof uses the analogy of legal alcohol.
But there are an estimated 15 million alcoholics in this country and 5 million drug addicts; do we want
the 5 to become 15?

Those who argue for drug legalization often make Kristof's mistake, and claim that we can not reduce drug
use. But we have, which should prove that it is possible.

One can argue that we have paid too much, in many ways, for that reduction, and I will listen with respect
to anyone who makes that kind of argument, as long as they provide reasonable support for their
conclusions.

I should warn you, however, that the dispute has become so politicized over the years that I do not rush
to look at any new argument on the subject. There is so much chaff, and so little wheat, that it
often seems unprofitable to try to separate the two.

(The late Milton Friedman once argued that legalizing drugs would reduce drug use. That just
shows that a man can be a great economist, and a wonderful man — and still make silly arguments.
An economist should know that reducing the price of drugs — and legalizing drugs would reduce
their prices — would lead to increased consumption, not decreased.)

Morning Chuckle: President Obama says he wants to govern with a
"light touch".

"I think the irony . . . is that I actually would like to see a relatively light touch when it comes to
the government," he said Tuesday in a White House interview.

It is a counterintuitive case to make when his government is a majority shareholder of General Motors, and
when he will propose Wednesday new oversight of big financial institutions, new capital requirements for
banks and a new consumer-protection agency for small investors.

The key word may be "relatively".

Which will lead almost everyone to ask: Relatively to whom? Certainly not any of our recent
presidents.